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In today’s podcast at 10AM Eastern, Humberto Fontova will be talking about his article, Obama Appoints Castro’s Lawyer as White House Counsel
Among the throng of Clinton regime retreads recruited for the Obama administration we find Gregory Craig. Craig served as Obama’s advisor on Latin American during the campaign, and was appointed last week as chief White House Counsel.
The MSM has mentioned Craig’s role as Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer, but mostly has omitted mention of Craig’s role as chief facilitator for Fidel Castro’s shanghaiing of Elian Gonzalez.
Officially Craig served as attorney for Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. This humble man worked as a hotel doorman in a nation where the average monthly salary is $16. The high-rolling Gregory Craig worked for Washington D.C.’s elite firm, Williams & Connolly, one of America’s highest-priced law firms.
Upon accepting the case, Gregory Craig had flown to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. Craig’s remuneration, we learned shortly after his return, came from a “voluntary fund” set up by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and “administered” by the National Council of Churches. The same reporters and pundits, who routinely erupt with snide snorts midway through any statement by a Republican press secretary, reported this item with a straight face.
But then, this media also reports that Castro’s Cuba provides free and exquisite health-care. And the explanation of Craig’s funding issued from the same source.
Craig presided over the CBS interview
During the taping of Dan Rather’s 60 Minutes interview with Juan Miguel Gonzalez in April 2000,Pedro Porro served as Rather’s in-studio translator. Dan would ask the question in English into Porro’s earpiece and Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian’s heavily guarded father.
“Juan Miguel was never completely alone,” says Pedro Porro. “He never smiled. His eyes kept shifting back and forth. It was obvious to me that he was under coercion. He was always surrounded by security agents from the Cuban Interest Section, as they called it. When these agents left him alone for a few seconds, Gregory Craig himself would be hovering over Juan Miguel.”
Yes, Gregory Craig had led the Juan Miguel/Cuban-Security entourage into the studio, then presided over the interview as a movie director. “Most of the questions Dan Rather was asking Elian’s father during that 60 Minutes interview were being handed to him by Gregory Craig,” says Pedro Porro. “It was obvious that Greg Craig and Dan Rather where on very friendly terms. They were joshing and bantering back and forth, as Juan Miguel sat there petrified. Craig was stage-managing the whole thing. The taping would stop and Craig would walk over to Dan, hand him a little slip of paper, say something into his ear. Then Rather would read straight from the paper.”
“At one point Craig stopped the taping almost like a movie director yelling, ‘Cut!’ I was confused for a moment, says Porro, “until Greg Craig complained that Juan Miguel’s answers were not coming across from his translator with “sufficient emotion.” “So Dan Rather shut everything down for a while and some of the crew drove to a drama school in New York. They hired a dramatic actor to act as a translator, and brought him back.”
A week later, this:
Another Obama appointee: Eric Holder, who
In 1999, over the objections of the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, and prosecuting attorneys, Holder supported Clinton’s commutation of the sentences of 16 FALN conspirators. These pardons — of terrorists who even Holder has conceded had not expressed any remorse — were issued in the months after al-Qaeda’s 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, when the Clinton administration was pretending to be the scourge of terrorism. The commutations were nakedly political, obviously designed by Clinton to assist his wife’s impending Senate campaign by appealing to New York’s substantial Puerto Rican vote.
I don’t know which Puerto Ricans voted for Clinton for freeing convicted terrorists; instead the vote probably went because of the usual Democrat indentity politics canvassing. In any case, Power Line has the video where
Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch grills Holder concerning the lack of screening by the Department of Justice in connection with the pardons
Here’s the video:
The Obama administration: Change back to the future!
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UPDATE
Via Instapundit, Laurence Tribe’s 2000 article, Justice Taken Too Far
Although a federal court had ordered that Elian not be removed from the country pending a determination of his asylum petition, and although a court had ruled that the Immigration and Naturalization Service could exercise custody and control of Elian for the time being, no judge or neutral magistrate had issued the type of warrant or other authority needed for the executive branch to break into the home to seize the child. The agency had no more right to do so than any parent who has been awarded custody would have a right to break and enter for such a purpose. Indeed, the I.N.S. had not even secured a judicial order, as opposed to a judicially unreviewed administrative one, compelling the Miami relatives to turn Elian over.
The Justice Department points out that the agents who stormed the Miami home were armed not only with guns but with a search warrant. But it was not a warrant to seize the child. Elian was not lost, and it is a semantic sleight of hand to compare his forcible removal to the seizure of evidence, which is what a search warrant is for.
Go read all of it.
